American Experience (1988) s16e02 Episode Script

1
Narrator: April 11th, 1865
two days after the end of the Civil War.
In the White House,
President Abraham Lincoln agonized over his first speech
since the defeat of the South.
The jubilant crowd outside
expected a celebration of the Union victory.
Instead, the president warned
that "Reconstruction," as he called it,
would be "fraught with great difficulty."
EDWARD AYERS, HISTORIAN:
The war has spiraled far beyond
EDWARD AYERS, HISTORIAN:
the worst imaginings of anyone.
Over six hundred thousand people had died
in the last four years.
The largest slave system in the modern world
is in shambles and no one knows what is going to replace it.
People just can't imagine how
they're going to put the country back together again.
DAVID BLIGHT, HISTORIAN:
It is a revolutionary, chaotic situation,
DAVID BLIGHT, HISTORIAN:
and the responsibility now
was to come up with a plan to restore this society.
But you also had to do it
with this deep and abiding division over race.
NARRATOR: Three days later,
the statesman who led the Union through the Civil War
was assassinated.
Suddenly,
the extraordinary challenge of reconstructing the nation
was in the hands of ordinary men and women.
A Yankee officer
would venture to the most violent corner of Louisiana
to try to impose order.
A plantation mistress
whose slaves were now free
would struggle to reclaim her place in the world.
A fiery black minister
would mount a pitched battle with white landowners.
And a new President
would force a dramatic showdown with Congress.
ERIC FONER, HISTORIAN:
An old order, an old social order has been destroyed;
ERIC FONER, HISTORIAN:
and everything is up for grabs.
CLARENCE WALKER, HISTORIAN:
The violence in the South
CLARENCE WALKER, HISTORIAN:
was a way
CLARENCE WALKER, HISTORIAN:
to reestablish white Supremacy.
This was a war of terror.
NARRATOR: After four bloody years of Civil War,
Americans, North and South
would continue to fight over the meaning of freedom,
the meaning of citizenship,
and the survival of the nation itself.
READING, Kate Stone:
The life we are living now
READING, Kate Stone:
is a miserable, frightened one
- living in constant dread of great danger,
not knowing what form it may take,
and utterly helpless to protect ourselves.
NARRATOR: Kate Stone was 21-years-old
when the Civil War came to her doorstep.
In the winter of 1862,
Union troops overran Milliken's Bend,
only a few miles from Brokenburn,
the family's plantation in Louisiana.
Stone watched as bluecoats scoured the countryside
for food and supplies
and ransacked plantations.
EDWARD L.AYERS, HISTORIAN:
Before the Civil War,
EDWARD L.AYERS, HISTORIAN:
the South would have been
EDWARD L.AYERS, HISTORIAN:
among the five richest societies in the world.
To the eyes of the South,
this is almost this biblical attack.
It's like a plague being brought down on the white South.
Their sense of self has been shattered
just as their property has.
Those are the memories
that white southerners hold to close to them
as examples that their enemy were not really
honorable men.
NARRATOR: With her father dead
and her brothers away fighting for the Confederacy,
managing Brokenburn fell to Kate Stone and her mother.
The plantation was 1260 acres,
with 150 slaves.
DREW GILPIN FAUST, HISTORIAN:
Owning 150 slaves
DREW GILPIN FAUST, HISTORIAN:
meant that they were in the absolute upper echelons
of Southern society and Southern wealth.
And so she is both a young privileged woman,
but she finds herself, essentially,
on the battlefield.
And sees Yankee troops frequently,
runs from Yankee troops.
NARRATOR: Many of her wealthy neighbors abandoned their homes.
The Stones clung to their plantation,
and determined to wait it out.
As frightening to Kate as the federal troops
were the black men and women
now claiming their freedom.
READING, Kate Stone:
Mr. Hardison's Negroes came out today
READING, Kate Stone:
Six men with their children and clothes
walked off in broad daylight after a terrible row,
using the most abusive language to Mrs. Hardison
The other negroes declare they are free,
and will leave as soon as they are ready.
NELL PAINTER, HISTORIAN:
It was a tremendous shock
NELL PAINTER, HISTORIAN:
for many in the planter class to discover,
first of all,
that the people who worked for them
were not happy to work for them,
and secondly,
sometimes the people who had worked for them
were really angry at them.
FAUST:
Kate expresses a lot of fear
FAUST:
throughout the war,
and it's most often fear of armed slaves.
"What are they going to do to me,
given what we have done to them?"
NARRATOR: Mother and daughter watched as their world was upended,
until they could watch no more.
FAUST:
This kind of lack of order,
FAUST:
lack of control,
FAUST:
was the most frightening thing to the Stones.
READING, Kate Stone:
With much difficulty
READING, Kate Stone:
we got everything ready for the start at midnight
the night was cloudy and dark
with occasional claps of thunder,
but we had to go then
or never.
NARRATOR: From Louisiana,
the Stones fled three hundred miles
by horseback and boat to Tyler, Texas.
There, they joined other wealthy planters,
who had also escaped to wait out the war.
READING, Kate Stone:
God will aid us in our righteous cause
READING, Kate Stone:
the people will fight till the last foe expires,
to conquer or die.
NARRATOR: Less than two yeas later,
General William Tecumseh Sherman
scorched a path of destruction across Georgia
that ended with the capture of Savannah.
In December 1864,
Sherman offered the port city to President Lincoln
as a Christmas gift.
Union victory was near.
The general took for his headquarters
the mansion of one of the city's wealthiest cotton merchants.
He celebrated with his officers,
feasting on native oysters and turtle soup.
On the outskirts of the city,
thousands of emancipated slaves were gathered.
They had followed Sherman's army to Savannah,
doubling the city's population.
In the Book of Revelations it is written
that the first shall be last and the last shall be first.
And this is interpreted as that moment
where God, in his omnipotence,
has now come to deliver his people
from bondage.
NARRATOR: "It came so sudden on 'em,
they wasn't prepared for it,"
recalled one liberated slave.
"Just think of whole droves of people,
that had hardly ever left the plantation,
turned loose all at once
with nothing in the world
but the clothes on their back."
Lincoln 's Emancipation Proclamation
had freed slaves across the South.
But Washington still had no clear plan
for what to do once African Americans were free.
On January 11th,
President Lincoln sent his Secretary of War,
Edwin M. Stanton to Savannah.
Stanton instructed General Sherman
to set up a meeting with some of the city's black ministers.
He wanted to hear how the freedmen
imagined their future in the South.
That evening,
twenty black men entered the grand parlor
as guests of Stanton and Sherman.
Sixteen were former slaves.
They chose Reverend Garrison Frazier
who'd purchased his freedom nine years earlier,
to be their spokesmen.
For the first time,
Federal officials conferred with freed slaves
about the future of African Americans in the South.
DAVIV W.BLIGHT, HISTORIAN:
The exchange that occurs
DAVIV W.BLIGHT, HISTORIAN:
between Sherman, Stanton, and the Union generals,
and Reverend Frazier,
is one of the extraordinary moments of the Civil War
and the ending of the Civil War,
because they asked Frazier not just,
"What should we do with all these refugees?"
They asked him questions about what the war meant.
They asked him questions about what the Emancipation Proclamation had meant.
They asked him what the presence of black troops in the Union army meant.
And, in many ways, you'll find no better definition
of the meaning of the Civil War
in the kinds of answers
that Garrison Frazier gives that day in Savannah.
READING, Garrison Frazier:
The freedom, as I understand it,
READING, Garrison Frazier:
promised by the Emancipation Proclamation
is taking us from under the yoke of bondage,
and placing us
where we could reap the fruit of our own labor.
WALKER:
To be a slave,
WALKER:
as one of these ministers pointed out to General Sherman,
was to be someone
who had no control over his life's decisions.
And now
these people feel the need
to express their abilities, their choices.
READING, Garrison Frazier:
The way we can best take care of ourselves
READING, Garrison Frazier:
is to have land
and we can soon maintain ourselves
and have something to spare.
We want to be placed on land
until we are able to buy it
and make it our own.
BLIGHT:
This was a man, who'd never left,
BLIGHT:
probably, coastal Georgia in his life,
but he understood the Declaration of Independence,
he understood the Emancipation Proclamation.
And beyond that, he said, in effect:
"You should give us our rights,
and you should protect our rights,
and then you should leave us alone
and let us be citizens."
NARRATOR: Four days later,
anxious to get thousands of freed slaves off his hands,
and Washington off his back,
General Sherman issued Special Field Order 15.
It was only a temporary order,
but it became one of the most controversial of the Civil War.
Plantations in the rice country
had been abandoned by white planters during the war.
Four hundred thousand of these acres
would be given over to African American for settlement.
The huge land tract
included the Sea Islands
and parts of the Georgia
and South Carolina coast.
ERIC FONER, HISTORIAN:
Forty acres of land will be given out to each family.
Plus, Sherman says,
the Army's got tons of mules, which we don't really need.
They're broken down from our long march.
If any one wants a mule they can have one of these mules.
This is the origin of that famous phrase,
"forty acres and a mule."
BLIGHT:
Here was a real revolution,
BLIGHT:
a revolution in the land,
on the land,
a chance to be their own freeholders.
NARRATOR: For four million African Americans in the South,
news of "forty acres and a mule"
spread as fast as the contagion of freedom itself.
Many saw this as proof
that emancipation would finally give black men and women
a true stake
in the land they had toiled on for centuries.
READING, Kate Stone:
Our forces are victorious
READING, Kate Stone:
Great Peace rumors are afloat,
and General Lee has certainly given Grant's army a good drubbing
We hear that general Sherman is dead.
NARRATOR: Through the winter and spring of 1865,
Kate Stone and her mother remained in Texas,
clinging to every desperate rumor of Rebel victory.
In April, they learned the true state of things
At a Courthouse in Appomattox, Virginia,
Lee had surrendered his army.
The Confederate rebellion had been crushed.
READING, Kate Stone:
"Conquered,"
READING, Kate Stone:
"Submission,"
READING, Kate Stone:
"Subjugation"
are words that burn into my heart.
The degradation seems more than we can bear.
FAUST:
I think those words had particular relevance
FAUST:
in a white Southern society
that was fixated on honor.
Honor and glory,
independence,
were at the core
of the white South's understanding of itself,
and particularly
the understanding that male Southerners
had of what it meant to be men,
what it meant to have manhood.
Because who is conquered, subjugated?
That's a slave.
AYERS:
The white South
AYERS:
can only imagine that they must have
invoked God's wrath in some way.
Maybe God is punishing us.
But surely he does not mean for black people to be their equal.
Maybe slavery was meant to end.
But surely God didn't mean for black people
to stand alongside whites.
FAUST:
There's a story of a slave
FAUST:
who ran away from his master,
joined the Union army
and came back into the South
and seized his own master's plantation with his regiment.
And he sees his former master and he says
"Bottom rail on top this time, Massah.
Bottom rail's on top now."
NARRATOR: In his first speech after the Union victory,
Lincoln alluded to the enormous challenges
reconstruction would bring.
He even suggested that some black men in the South
might get the vote.
His words infuriated many,
including a Confederate sympathizer
who assassinated the president three days later.
With Lincoln gone,
the question of how to put the country back together again
took on even greater urgency.
Northerners were exhausted by four years of war.
Most had hoped Lincoln would reconcile North and South
and get the States get back to normal relations
as soon as possible.
But there was no consensus on how to achieve this.
Just as uncertain
was the future of millions of black men and women
freed into a society where many whites,
North and South,
questioned the idea of any rights for former slaves.
TED TUNNELL, HISTORIAN:
The notion of civil rights for blacks
TED TUNNELL, HISTORIAN:
was revolutionary.
TED TUNNELL, HISTORIAN:
Nineteenth century American's
whole notion of what it meant to be an American
was all wrapped up in whiteness.
An American was a person with white skin.
BLIGHT:
Here you have the great questions of Reconstruction
BLIGHT:
immediately are what people faced:
who will rule in the South,
who will rule in federal government,
and will the dimensions of black freedom be?
NARRATOR: All eyes looked to Washington.
Former Confederates held their breath,
and steeled themselves for the worst.
AYERS:
The South doesn't know what to expect.
AYERS:
Will there be punishment for leaders?
AYERS:
Will there be land confiscated?
Will there be an occupying army?
And a lot of people imagined
that these traitors,
these people who had tried to destroy the United States,
should be executed,
should be imprisoned.
NARRATOR: No one was sure what to expect from the new president.
Andrew Johnson was from Tennessee,
but he had fiercely opposed the Confederate secession
and was the only southern senator
who refused to give up his seat in Congress.
AYERS:
Andrew Johnson
AYERS:
embodies a lot of the hopes that
Abraham Lincoln has
that the Union can be put back together
easily.
But Andrew Johnson
had been an outspoken enemy
of the big planters,
who he blamed for causing secession.
FONER:
In Tennessee politics,
FONER:
he saw himself as a spokesman for the poor whites.
He owned a slave or two,
but he was not a member of the plantation aristocracy.
In fact, he resented them very much.
NARRATOR: In his first speech after taking office,
Johnson warned that traitors had to be punished.
But Johnson shared the white South's desire
to keep blacks subordinate.
Frederick Douglass, the renowned black leader,
got his own impression of Johnson
when the two met for the first time
at Lincoln's second inaugural.
TUNNELL:
The very first expression that came over Johnson's face
was one of scorn and derision.
And Douglass concluded
that that expression was the true index of his heart.
Douglass turned to a companion and said,
"Whatever else this man may be, he is no friend of our race."
NARRATOR: Even as Lee surrendered to Grant,
scores of newly emancipated men and women
were arriving at St. Catherine's
in the Sea Islands of Georgia.
Under Sherman's Field Order 15,
these abandoned lands would be theirs.
Leading them was 53-year-old Tunis G. Campbell,
from New Jersey.
For years, Campbell had worked tirelessly as an abolitionist,
a preacher,
an educator,
and political organizer.
With the help of Secretary of War Stanton,
Campbell got himself appointed superintendent
for the Union occupied islands in Georgia.
FONER:
There were a lot of people in 1865
FONER:
who were trying to tell blacks what freedom is,
and tell them what they ought to be doing.
Campbell reflects the impulse,
"We should really determine ourselves what we're doing."
Independence from white control
- that's critical to their definition of what freedom is.
It just happens that
on St. Catherine's Island you can create such a thing.
The whites have all fled.
Sherman has given out land.
So the opportunity to create
an independent black community exists.
NARRATOR: "We left with rations and a few families
and at Hilton Head got more,"
Campbell wrote,
"and Savannah loaded us as deep as we could swim."
These deserted lands had been at the heart
of the South's rice-growing empire.
RUSSELL DUNCAN, HISTORIAN:
As Campbell arrived to the island
RUSSELL DUNCAN, HISTORIAN:
and they put the gangplank down,
the island was overgrown.
It's been looted by Union naval forces.
The sea grass is high.
There are rattlesnakes.
There are alligators.
He can see the slave cabins.
They're also in great disrepair.
Immediately upon arriving and assessing the situation there,
he writes to the American Missionary Association
asking for seed,
asking for plows,
sweet potatoes to supplement the diet,
marriage licenses for the people.
And
he calls a meeting of the people
to explain to them: "This is our home."
Uh, "Beginning next week,
I will divide up
the land into forty acres for each of you."
NARRATOR: By June, the settlers had crops in the ground.
"I have corn,
watermelons,
citron, onions, radishes and squash,"
wrote Campbell.
"But the rebels have destroyed the sweet potatoes.
Do not fail to send them.
Send eight No. 11 plows,
six cultivators
- get the improved ones."
BLIGHT:
Tunis Campbell sees the South
BLIGHT:
as a kind of new political frontier.
He sees himself as a kind of political pioneer,
to go to that place
where this new regime
of black political liberty
and civil liberty might flourish.
NARRATOR: Campbell arrived at St. Catherine's
with his own blueprint for a government.
There would be a Congress
with eight men in the Senate
and twenty in the House of Representatives.
A Supreme Court,
and Campbell himself as President.
He even established a 275-man militia.
"Order," said Campbell, "is Heaven's first law."
DUNCAN:
So you've got this tiny little island, twelve miles long,
DUNCAN:
three miles wide,
and a government set up
to resemble the United States government
Supreme Court at the top.
It's wonderful,
beautiful,
experiment in democracy;
and people took to it very well.
They liked the idea of having the power
to select their leaders and remove them.
NARRATOR: But at St. Catherine's,
no one was going to remove Tunis Campbell.
NARRATOR: That same fall,
nine black soldiers and their white captain
climbed aboard a sternwheeler in New Orleans,
and headed up river.
The captain, Marshall Twitchell,
was a career soldier from Vermont
who had led black troops during the war.
He had fought at Antietam,
Fredericksburg,
the Wilderness,
and just about every other major battle in the East.
TUNNELL:
Twitchell is one of those Union veterans
TUNNELL:
who enlist in the first year of the war and stays the duration.
He's wounded several times.
He gets a Minie ball right in his face.
It cuts a grove around his face
and exits behind his ear.
He'll have the scar for the rest of his life.
NARRATOR: The war was over,
and Twitchell was restless.
In New Orleans,
he got himself a commission in the Freedmen's Bureau.
In the chaotic post-war South,
the job of the Freedmen's Bureau agent
was to smooth the transition from slavery to freedom.
The Bureau built schools for the former slaves
and fed and clothed war refugees,
black and white.
Twitchell was posted to Bienville Parish,
in northern Louisiana,
a place he knew nothing about.
TUNNELL:
Here he is on a sternwheeler,
TUNNELL:
heading up the Red River.
This region had never been conquered.
So he's entering the last part of the Confederacy to surrender.
It is dangerous, exotic. It's isolated.
And he doesn't know it
but he is entering
what is probably the most violent place in America.
It's no coincidence
that Harriet Beecher Stowe
chose to put the final,
brutal ending of Uncle Tom's Cabin,
where Uncle Tom is beaten to death by Simon Legree,
it's no coincidence that she puts it
on the upper Red River.
It's a violent region.
NARRATOR: "I was without telegraphy,
railway or water connections,"
remembered Twitchell.
"If I'd known beforehand what my position was to be,
I should have remained with my regiment."
At the courthouse in Sparta, the county seat,
Captain Twitchell set up office
as the sole Freedmen's Bureau agent for the parish.
He soon discovered his new neighbors
were as hardened to battle as he was.
My great-grandfather
had, uh, two brothers killed in the war,
and another wounded.
And and I'm named after one of 'em.
There wasn't a family here
that didn't lose somebody to the war.
But in our little area,
these veterans were never defeated
and that is a lot of the feeling here.
The war just ended and
and so everybody went home.
And up into the midst of this came Twitchell.
TUNNELL:
The people of the area are wary.
TUNNELL:
They don't quite know what to expect,
but they quickly discover
that this Freedman's Bureau agent is
somebody that they're going to have to deal with.
NARRATOR: Agents like Twitchell had military authority
to settle labor disputes and conflicts
between former slaves and masters.
TUNNELL:
Planters certainly resented this intrusion
TUNNELL:
into so sensitive an area.
They wanted direct control over black labor.
They didn't want some Yankee Freedman's Bureau agent there
questioning their behavior,
actually sitting them down and having them testify.
And for the freedmen,
here was somebody that they could
go to if they were mistreated.
He can't fundamentally change
the economic lives of these people.
All he can do is try to be a mediator;
to give them some degree of justice.
NARRATOR: Twitchell would soon learn
that for a Yankee officer all alone in northwest Louisiana,
even a degree of federal justice
might be too much.
NARRATOR: For the first forty-eight days
of Andrew Johnson's presidency
Southerners waited anxiously to hear what he would demand
before allowing them back into the Union.
On May 29, 1865,
Johnson announced his plan for what would be called
"Presidential Reconstruction."
BLIGHT:
There was good evidence in 1865
BLIGHT:
that a lot of white Southerners,
the leadership even of the Confederacy,
would have accepted
relatively harsh policies at that moment.
But very soon it became clear
that Andrew Johnson wanted a rapid,
lenient restoration of the Union
with as little alteration
of the Constitution
and the creation of black civil and political rights
as possible.
NARRATOR: Johnson would issue blanket pardons
for most former Confederates.
The Rebel States
would be encouraged to form new governments quickly.
Washington would not interfere.
The president's leniency surprised many in the North.
Southerners responded with relief.
FONER:
Johnson actually sets only the most minimal requirements.
FONER:
All they have to do
is admit, "We lost the Civil War.
The Civil War is over.
Slavery and secession are dead."
Other than that, there are no requirements.
NARRATOR: Johnson was harder on the planter aristocracy.
He insisted that wealthy planters and Confederate leaders
write him personally and beg for clemency.
FONER:
This basically eliminates the planter class
FONER:
from leadership of Southern politics.
If you're not pardoned,
you can't vote, you can't hold office,
and you can't get your property back
if it's been seized by the federal government.
NARRATOR: Andrew Johnson had no sympathy for wealthy planters.
He had risen from poverty
and identified with poor white southerners,
who, before the war, had far outnumbered the slave owners.
Now, he was anxious to protect poor whites
from what they saw as a new threat.
WALKER:
Poor whites have to face the fact
WALKER:
that now that black people are free
means that they have to compete
with this new element
for livelihood,
for social position,
and political power ultimately.
And this is a very frightening thing.
FONER:
Johnson's aim is to bring
the white South and the white North back together.
African Americans just do not play a role
in Johnson's vision of the postwar South,
other than to go back to work
and be landless and rightless plantation laborers.
NARRATOR: Johnson's contempt for the freedmen
infuriated many in Washington,
and none more than Thaddeus Stevens.
The congressman from Pennsylvania
had been a fierce abolitionist long before the war.
Within the Republican Party
he led a small, vocal faction known as the Radicals.
FONER:
These were principled men.
Before the war they had been the strongest republicans
opposing the expansion of slavery.
During the Civil War they had been the first ones
to call for arming of black troops,
for issuing an Emancipation Proclamation.
Long before there was any
conceivable political benefit to be gained
from supporting the rights of black people,
they were doing it.
BLIGHT:
The Radical Republicans had a vision
of what Reconstruction should be.
They believed it should be longer in duration.
They believed the Southern States had left the Union
and destroyed their status as States.
They had to be reinvented.
To Thaddeus Stevens, Reconstruction meant
not only safeguarding
and preserving
the essential results of the Civil War,
but in his vision it meant remaking the South.
It meant the increase of democracy in terms of representation.
It meant the spread of the right of suffrage.
NARRATOR: The Radicals' hard-line
marginalized them within their own party.
Most Republicans feared the Radicals' position on black rights
would drive away white voters in the North.
WALKER:
It is the radical wing
WALKER:
which is the most sympathetic to black people.
The Party in general was committed to
a limited program of civil rights,
protection of property,
education, etc.
But the party is not in any way committed
to any sort of radical restructuring of Southern society.
NARRATOR: Johnson's reconstruction plan
could not be challenged until Congress convened in December.
That summer,
Radical leaders could only watch
as scores of planters descended on Washington
pleading to be pardoned.
Whose petition would be denied
or granted was uncertain.
Still, former Confederates were hopeful.
"White men alone,"
President Johnson told one senator,
"must manage the South."
NARRATOR: On St. Catherine's Island,
Tunis Campbell's township was flourishing.
Three hundred and sixty-nine settlers
occupied fifty-four slave dwellings,
left from the old days.
They grew fruits and vegetables of all kinds.
But what they wanted were schools.
"There is one sin that slavery committed against me
that I will never forgive,
remembered one man.
"It robbed me of my education."
WALKER:
Before the Civil War,
WALKER:
maybe no more than ten, fifteen percent
of the black population of the South was literate.
To learn how to read
was a revolutionary act.
They understood that it was necessary
if they were to take their place
as freed people within the Union,
that they have
the rudiments of education to survive.
NARRATOR: After the war,
freedmen who had secretly educated themselves
quickly opened schools in warehouses,
on barges,
even in old slave markets.
And the Freedmen's Bureau
and Northern missionaries
built thousands more throughout the South.
At St. Catherine's,
Campbell used his own savings
to bring teachers down from the North.
Then he called on his wife, Harriet, in New York.
DUNCAN:
He writes a letter to Harriet,
says, "Bring the sons down.
We're going to establish the schools.
We're on an island of our own.
There are no white people here
and we're going to lift up children.
Bring all the primers you have,
and please join us."
This is the first time he's seen his wife and sons
in about two years.
NARRATOR: Harriet and Tunis taught side by side
with Northern teachers.
Campbell reported
that eighty children and adults on St. Catherine's
and sixty on nearby Sapelo Island
were enrolled in schools.
More than a thousand students
attended Campbell's makeshift academies.
DUNCAN:
The adults are being taught at night.
They need to deal with white people more as equals.
And to do that, they have to be literate.
NARRATOR: White planters watching from the mainland
resented the schools and the entire settlement,
not just because the land had been seized
from one of their own,
but because of Campbell's ambition and independence.
WALKER:
People like Campbell
were viewed as black people "out of their place."
He can think for himself in ways
that whites find hard to believe that a black person can think.
This means, then, that history has somehow
spun out of control.
NARRATOR: By June 1865,
Jacob Waldburg,
the white planter who had owned St. Catherine's,
was back in Georgia.
He demanded that Campbell get off his land.
DUNCAN:
The planters are holding up deeds to the islands
that are two hundred years old,
or one hundred fifty years old.
They said, "No, wait a minute.
This is a nation of laws, and see,
my great-granddaddy had this deed.
And yours comes
from a possessory title given to you in time of war
for abandoned lands?
How does that affect
my promise of property rights
under the Constitution of the United States?"
NARRATOR: Waldburg got his answer:
St. Catherine's Congress passed a law
forbidding any white person from setting foot on the island.
Campbell's militia stood ready to enforce it.
READING, Kate Stone:
At home again,
but so many changes
It does not seem the same place
the bare, echoing rooms,
the neglect and defacement of all
gardens, orchard and fences are mostly swept away
Nothing is left but to endure.
NARRATOR: When Kate Stone and her mother
returned to their Louisiana home after the war,
they were nearly bankrupt.
There was no credit to be had.
Of the one hundred fifty slaves they had owned,
only a few remained at Brokenburn.
The Stones had safeguarded the family silver
before their escape.
Now it was a reminder of the wealth
and position the family had lost.
What the women mourned most
were the men who had sacrificed themselves
for the Southern cause.
FAUST:
Many white southerners find themselves
facing as Kate Stone does,
a defeat that has taken the lives
of her brothers and her uncle
and so many of the people she's known.
When, um, Kate's oldest brother,
who is not killed in the war comes back,
he hardly speaks, she says, for many months,
after his return.
This was a civilization
in which three out of four men of military age served.
Many of them were in the war for years on end.
How would we not expect
that that experience
and defeat
and slaughter and tragedy
would have left them in some sense wounded.
All these hundreds of thousands of Confederate soldiers
are going back home,
uncertain of what they're going to find,
and uncertain of what they're going to do.
As they look around and see
the freed black people
refusing to do just what white men tell them to do,
and trying to create freedom for their families,
everything looks to them
as an insult and as a threat.
White southerners say,
"We gotta make it clear who's boss.
We gotta make clear
that we're in control of all of this."
NARRATOR: In Washington,
President Johnson shared white southerner's concerns
over growing black independence in the South.
WALKER:
Johnson is seeing a black population
who have abandoned the plantations.
People who are demanding that they be treated
in a decent fashion.
And Johnson believes
they should return to their former places of work
and above all should accept their subordination
to white power and authority.
AYERS:
Andrew Johnson believes
if there's going to be a reconciliation between North and South,
that it's going to be a reconciliation of white northerners
and white southerners.
And if black people have to be set aside, fine.
NARRATOR: The President abandoned
his strict policy toward the planters.
By fall of 1865,
he was pardoning so many
that special clerks had to be hired
to keep up with the paperwork.
FONER:
Johnson thinks that only the planters can really
keep these African Americans under control,
so very quickly he begins to bring the wealthy planters back
into his Reconstruction policy,
in order to
really impose subordination on the former slaves.
DUNCAN:
The planters only want to be pardoned
so that they could get their land back.
And so Andrew Johnson complies with their wishes,
pardoning fifteen to twenty thousand planters,
hundreds of them being pardoned every day.
When these planters then are pardoned,
they return to their islands
and to their acreages all over the South,
and they want the people who are then living there,
removed.
NARRATOR: The President ordered
that Confederate lands seized by Union troops during the war
be returned to the planters,
including land confiscated
under General Sherman's Field Order 15.
NARRATOR: In Georgia,
the assistant commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau
refused to give planters back their land.
Johnson fired him
and replaced him with someone who would.
In Washington,
the head of the Bureau, General O.O. Howard,
sympathized with the freedmen
and resisted the president's decree
for as long as he could.
Finally in October,
Howard set out for the black settlement at Edisto Island,
off the coast of South Carolina.
His orders from President Johnson were to
"effect an agreement mutually satisfactory
to the freedmen and the land owners."
Behind the bureaucratic language
Johnson's directive was clear.
FONER:
General Howard has to tell
these former slaves
that the land that they thought had been given to them
by the Federal Government
now is going to be given back to the former owners.
And if they want to remain there,
they're going to have to sign labor contracts
to work as laborers on these plantations.
These people believe that they have a right to this land.
To them this is a violation,
a deep betrayal of
the promises that the government made to them.
They are not willing to just take this lying down.
READING, General Howard:
I'd endeavored to explain the wishes of the President,
and with one voice they cried,
"No! No!"
In the noise and confusion,
a sweet-voiced Negro woman began the hymn,
"Nobody knows the trouble I feel.
Nobody knows but Jesus."
NARRATOR: Many had been following events in Washington
and insisted they would wait and see
what Congress had to say.
Others petitioned Howard in writing.
Wrote one man:
"You ask us to forgive the landowners of our island
the man who tied me to a tree and gave me thirty-nine lashes,
who stripped and flogged my mother and my sister
and will not let me stay in his empty hut,
except I will do his planting
and be satisfied with his price
- that man I cannot well forgive."
In January 1866,
a large contingent of black soldiers arrived at St. Catherine's
with orders to restore the land to Jacob Waldburg.
Campbell's militia had kept whites off the island
but this was something different.
DUNCAN:
Tunis Campell believed
that people have to take things into their own hands, sometimes.
But
African American freedmen
are not go into fire on African American soldiers. No.
NARRATOR: The experiment in independence at St. Catherine's
was over.
A determined Tunis Campbell headed for the Georgia mainland.
NARRATOR: In Louisiana,
black farmers had leased
over ten thousand acres from the Freedmen's Bureau,
believing they would soon own them outright.
Marshall Twitchell and other Freedmen's Bureau agents
delivered a different message:
No matter what they'd heard,
no forty acres and a mule was coming from this government.
TUNNELL:
This is what
Presidential Reconstruction is coming to mean.
It's telling the freedmen that
the government is not going to pamper you.
The government is not going to give you any land.
You have a hard row ahead of you.
Get used to it.
NARRATOR: "Freedom from slavery,"
Twitchell informed black laborers,
"is not freedom from work."
His words reflected worries shared by whites
North and South:
that freed African Americans would not work,
and would refuse to go back to the cotton fields.
FONER:
What would then happen to the cotton crop of the South?
Northern industry needs that cotton.
It's still the largest export of the United States.
To earn foreign money you need to export cotton.
Northerners were not willing to let blacks
stop growing cotton.
TUNNELL:
Freedmen, I think,
probably would have chosen
to duck out of the cotton economy all together.
You can't eat cotton.
For freedmen,
becoming an independent landowner is a dream.
That's their version of the American Dream.
But that kind of independence for freedmen,
Southern planters don't want it,
the Freedmen's Bureau doesn't want it.
Many Northerners in Congress don't want it.
NARRATOR: Across Louisiana,
white planters now sat down to draw up labor contracts
with the men they used to own.
AYERS:
No matter what color your skin is,
no matter what your status before the war had been,
it's a new order for everybody.
No matter what happens politically,
you've got to figure out
how you're going to feed yourself and your family.
That's the back beat.
That's the rhythm on which everything else depends.
WALKER:
The freed people understand
that they're going have to work,
but they do not want someone riding around on a horse
with a whip curled on his shoulder,
as the overseer had done under slavery.
And they also do not want to work for low wages.
FAUST:
For many white Southerners,
negotiating with slaves seemed unimaginable.
Because in the very notion of negotiation
is an assumption of some kind of equality.
And for many white Southerners,
they don't have anything to pay them with,
because they themselves are on the verge of desperation.
NARRATOR: "There is now nothing between me and the nigger
but the dollar,
the almighty dollar,"
said one South Carolina planter,
and I shall make out of him
the most I can at the least expense."
TUNNELL:
They want submissive, obedient employees.
I think in their heart of hearts they want a system
that is as close to slavery as possible.
NARRATOR: Black laborers who insisted on better wages
and working conditions
were regularly met with threats
and violence.
Vigilantes lynched whole families,
and used the bullwhip
on men and women as they had in slavery days.
In 1865,
more than two thousand black men, women, and children
were reported murdered in Louisiana alone.
WALKER:
The violence in the South
was a way to reestablish white supremacy.
TUNNELL:
These gangs of whites pick out
the guy who's trying to save his money,
who's trying to get ahead.
The man who is an inspiration
to other black people in the community
- he's the one that gets murdered.
It amounts to systematic
culling of alpha males from the black community.
NARRATOR: The southern legal system
became an instrument of intimidation.
Louisiana,
Texas,
South Carolina,
Mississippi,
and Florida,
passed laws that virtually prohibited freedmen
from any work except as field hands.
The laws were called "Black Codes."
The aim was slavery without the chain.
BLIGHT:
The Black Codes were laws passed
to control and restrict and constrain
the lives of the freed people,
essentially rendering them
bondsmen again under law.
NARRATOR: Some States made it illegal for freedmen
to handle weapons
and restricted them from buying or renting land.
Black children could be seized from poor families
and forced to work in the fields.
If a black man had no job,
he could be jailed
and auctioned to a planter for his labor.
FONER:
They make a travesty of the freedom
that African Americans have acquired.
They are so far from any notion of fairness
or freedom
that even northerners, who are not egalitarians,
say these laws are unacceptable.
And so northern Republicans are faced with a dilemma.
They don't want to have a big fight with the president,
but to accept the idea that Johnson's policy is a success,
and accept the Black Codes,
they feel means giving up the victory in the Civil War.
NARRATOR: To Louisiana's black veterans,
one freedman offered this advice:
"I would say to every colored soldier:
bring your gun home."
NARRATOR: By early 1866,
Marshall Twitchell was feeling pressure from the locals
who resented his authority.
Soon another distraction
made his life even more complicated.
Adele Coleman was just 20-years-old.
She was spirited,
intelligent,
and much admired by local bachelors.
Adele and Marshall became daily companions.
But their romance was troubled from the start.
Scandalized by their daughter's suitor,
Adele's parents forbade her to see the Yankee officer.
When she tried to continue the affair in secret,
Adele's brother, Gus
a Confederate veteran,
set out to hunt Twitchell down.
One evening,
a stranger came calling on Twitchell,
unannounced.
TUNNELL:
Marshall goes walking outside.
He's ready to blow this person away.
And then when the person speaks,
he hears Adele's voice.
It is Adele in disguise.
She has come to warn him
that her brother Gus is out gunning for him.
He, of course, is not going to let her ride home alone.
The trip takes two and a half to three hours.
It takes Marshall and Adele, this particular night,
all night.
Adele comes marching in with the morning sun
and the Coleman household just goes berserk, ballistic.
Twitchell has gotten himself into the position
whether he fully realizes it or not,
he's either going to marry her
or they're going to kill him.
Not everyone in northern Louisiana
believed marriage was the honorable solution.
MARSTON:
A southern girl,
following the Civil War,
there were no men,
there were no men to marry.
But,
for goodness sake, they couldn't marry a Yankee.
And Adele Coleman did.
But, a lot members of her own family
didn't like the fact that she had married a northerner,
and especially one in the position of power
that he was in.
NARRATOR: Six months after their wedding,
Marshall and Adele settled on a 420-acre plantation
overlooking Lake Bistineau.
It was as much an alliance as it was a marriage.
TUNNELL:
It opens up possibilities for the Colemans;
it opens up possibilities for him.
Here is, in a sense, the opportunity
to become wealthy much quicker
than he had ever anticipated.
The Colemans teach Marshall Twitchell about growing cotton
and he teaches them about Yankee business enterprise.
MARSTON:
Everybody in the South was broke.
And I think that he came to enrich himself.
And if that helped somebody then fine,
and if it hurt somebody,
that's the spoils of war.
NARRATOR: In December 1865,
the Thirty-Ninth Congress,
the first since the end of the Civil War,
convened in Washington.
More than sixty former Confederates
prepared to take their seats,
including four generals,
four colonels,
and six confederate cabinet officers,
even Alexander H. Stephens,
the former vice president of the Confederacy,
expecting as one observer put it,
"to govern the country
he had been trying to destroy."
BLIGHT:
If the South
was going to "rise again" so to speak,
control it's own political life,
control the freed people,
indeed if the ex-Confederates themselves
were going to be allowed back into leadership
at the national level,
then to so many white northerners it seemed like
the war would have been fought in vain.
NARRATOR: On the opening day,
the Clerk of the House
refused to announce the names of the Southern delegates
in his roll call.
The former Confederates
were denied their elected seats
and sent packing.
The fight for control of Reconstruction
had begun.
BLIGHT:
In many ways,
Congress was a poisoned atmosphere
in the debates over the Reconstruction policy.
There were raw war memories being played out.
There were visceral hatreds being played out
on the floor of Congress
between Republicans and Democrats.
These debates are between men
who have experienced this war,
who have fought this war.
They are fighting, literally,
about the meaning of that conflict
they have just fought.
NARRATOR: Northern Democrats sided with Johnson,
and railed against Republicans across the aisle.
Washington must get out of the way, they insisted,
and let southerners run their own affairs.
AYERS:
The Democrats had always
identified themselves as the party of the white man.
They very explicitly said,
"We are here to protect the rights
of white men North and South,
and how do we do that?
We hold the Union together."
For that reason the Democrats
saw themselves as trying to put the North and South
together as quickly as possible during the Civil War
and as soon as it's over,
trying to knit North and South together
at the expense of black men.
BLIGHT:
At one point in the debates
Thaddeus Stevens stood up,
and answering his Democratic colleagues says,
"Do not, I pray,
admit those who have slaughtered
half a million of our countrymen,
until their clothes are dried
and until they are re-clad.
I do not wish to it side by side with men
whose garments smell of the blood of my kindred."
It was Stevens's way of saying,
"We're going to keep the South out of the Union,
as long as we can,
and we're not going to allow anybody back in here
who was responsible for making the war."
NARRATOR: A Congressional committee on Reconstruction
concluded
that southern governments were unable to keep
law and order,
or stem violence against African Americans.
Allowing southern states unchecked power
so soon after the war,
the committee said,
was "madness and lunacy."
Moderate Republicans
had hoped to persuade Johnson
to provide minimal protections
for blacks in the south.
Now
even they were growing impatient
with the president's policies.
In March 1866,
both houses of Congress
passed a landmark Civil Rights Bill
that protected the rights of American citizens
without regard to race.
Republicans warned Johnson
not to veto the bill
if he hoped for any continued cooperation with Congress.
Two weeks later,
Johnson vetoed the Civil Rights Bill.
WALKER:
Johnson is opposed
to the granting of
those kinds of protections to black people.
This had not been done
for the white immigrants who had come to America
why then are you doing it for these black people?
NARRATOR: Moderate republicans were outraged.
FONER:
Johnson was stubborn,
self-righteous,
rigid in thinking.
He was really the worst person possible
to become President accidentally,
at a time
when flexibility,
vision
and creative leadership
were really what was required.
BLIGHT:
Moderate Republicans
were forced into the Radical camp
because they had to oppose Andrew Johnson.
Johnson's plan of Reconstruction was so lenient,
in utter contempt of black liberty
that it was simply unacceptable.
NARRATOR: A united Republican party
overrode Johnson's veto.
America had its first Civil Rights Act.
But many in Congress
argued that the act
was not enough
- that safeguarding civil rights
required changes to the Constitution itself.
Republican leaders proposed a new amendment.
FONER:
The Fourteenth Amendment
becomes the crux of the political battle in 1866,
and basically
what they put into the Constitution
is a new definition of American
nationality and citizenship,
making African Americans, for the first time,
full citizens of the United States.
This is the origin of the concept of civil rights
in American society,
rights which obtain to you as a citizen,
which cannot be rescinded because of your race.
BLIGHT:
This is a titanic debate
about just what the authority
of the Federal Government is going to be.
There were plenty of Americans who argued
the federal government had no right
to declare black people citizens.
FONER:
The Democrats are constantly
putting forward racist arguments:
You are eradicating a line
between black and white which has existed forever.
To Republicans,
what's at stake here, really,
is the definition of freedom.
If a person can be discriminated against
in every walk of life because of their race,
has slavery really been abolished?
NARRATOR: Congress overwhelmingly passed
the Fourteenth Amendment,
but it had to be ratified by three fourths of the states.
The President denounced the amendment,
and accused the Republicans of treason.
WALKER:
Johnson is opposed to an expansion of Federal power.
For him,
constitutional authority resides at the state level,
not at the national level.
And Johnson believes
that the Republicans are engaged
in an enormous usurpation of state authority.
NARRATOR: The lines were drawn.
NARRATOR: Since the end of the war,
black political conventions
had been taking place across the South.
The central issue was black suffrage.
"We simply ask that we be recognized as men,"
declared the South Carolina Convention of Colored People,
"that the same laws which govern over white men
shall govern black men."
"We stood by the government when it wanted help,"
a delegate from Mississippi wrote President Johnson,
"Now, will it stand by us?"
In New Orleans,
hundreds of black men declared they were ready to fight
for the right to vote.
Militant whites in the city
vowed to stamp out black agitators
and Radical Republicans.
President Johnson dismissed the growing signs of trouble.
At midday on July 30th 1866,
New Orleans exploded.
At the state convention,
a mob attacked white Radical Republican delegates
and their black supporters.
The Republicans
were chased out of the convention hall
and shot down.
Black men were murdered in the streets.
By the time federal troops restored order,
thirty-four blacks
and three white Radicals
had been killed.
AYERS:
And the Radicals say,
"We told you.
We told you that unless you stamp out
this serpent of white power in the South,
unless you kill it,
it's going to rise up again."
NARRATOR: The growing violence in the South
turned the mid-term elections of 1866
into a referendum on Presidential Reconstruction.
With Union war hero Ulysses S. Grant at his side,
Johnson barnstormed the Northeast and the Midwest.
Dubbed "The Swing Around the Circle,"
the speaking tour was an unprecedented effort
to sell his policies to northern voters.
It was a disaster.
At the podium,
the president traded insults with hostile crowds.
And blamed the slaughter in New Orleans on Congress.
BLIGHT:
He called the leadership of the Republican party traitors.
He even referred to himself as a Jesus figure,
being crucified on the cross of Radical Reconstruction,
which to many northerners was just
a kind of pathetic political rhetoric.
WALKER:
Many northerners felt that
black people should receive
only minimal constitutional protections.
And it is the South's intransigence,
and the policy that President Johnson pursues
by encouraging the South
to reconstitute itself,
that drives many northerners away
from his position.
NARRATOR: The Atlantic Monthly called the president
"egotistic to the point of mental disease
Insincere as well as stubborn,
cunning as well as unreasonable,
vain as well as ill-tempered."
That fall,
Republicans won three- fourths
of the seats in both houses of Congress,
enough to override any Johnson veto.
In only eighteen months,
the Radicals had gone from a fringe minority
to the center of Republican leadership.
Now it was their turn to define the course of Reconstruction.
Thaddeus Stevens was 75-years-old,
so frail
that he had to be carried into the House of Representatives
by admirers.
In a voice his colleagues could barely hear,
the tireless Stevens made a final plea
for federal intervention in the southern states.
READING, Thaddeus Stevens:
Congress has been sitting here,
and while the South has been bleeding at every pore,
Congress has done nothing
to protect the loyal people there
- white or black -
either in their persons,
in their liberty,
or in their property."
NARRATOR: In March 1867,
both houses of Congress again
rejected a veto by President Johnson,
and passed the Radicals' Reconstruction plan.
The former Confederate States
were divided into five military districts,
each commanded by a General
with power to enforce law and administer justice.
New southern governments would be created.
They would have to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment.
Their new State Constitutions
would have to be approved
by Congress.
And
black men would have the right to vote.
FONER:
This really was a remarkable leap in the dark
for world history.
It's the first
large scale experiment in interracial democracy
that had existed anywhere.
NARRATOR: When Tunis Campbell
learned of the Radicals' bold plan,
he immediately decided to run for office.
Marshall Twitchell also went into politics,
as a delegate to Louisiana's Constitutional Convention.
It was like nothing he'd ever seen.
More than half the delegates were black.
Within a year,
Andrew Johnson would be impeached by the Senate
for high crimes and misdemeanors.
His presidency would survive,
by a single vote.
NARRATOR: When Radical Reconstruction passed
there were still thirty-eight thousand federal troops
stationed in the South.
In Kate Stone's Louisiana,
more than half the regiments were black.
AYERS:
Women like Kate Stone look at this and see
embodied in black soldiers their greatest fear
These black men,
many of whom had been slaves
only eighteen months earlier,
they wear that uniform as if it's their right,
as if they're Americans, too.
FAUST:
For white southerners,
this is not just politics,
it's about your very core being.
Congress is going to do certain things,
but there's almost a kind of guerilla warfare
of the domestic, of the local,
of people just refusing to let society change.
WALKER:
From the point of view of the white South,
the Civil War was a tragic mistake.
They had only defended what they understood
to be their constitutional rights;
it was not that they had
disrupted the Union,
engaged in an act of treason.
They felt the North was a vicious aggressor,
committed to a perversion,
which was black equality.
This sense of a grievance
and sense of injustice only grew.
That this was something that was not to be accepted.
NARRATOR: In North Carolina,
the last legislature elected solely by the white vote
adjourned.
The legislators marked the occasion
with a whisky punch party.
Before long
the state capitol was in a drunken uproar.
With the ballot in black hands,
many expected to give up their seats to former slaves.
"We have lost all hope of escaping the vengeance
of the Northern people,
wrote one senator,
"and all are preparing for the worst."
TUNNELL:
What Reconstruction does
by suddenly enfranchising blacks,
it communicates the message that all of a sudden
these people who have been part
of the background scenery,
who've been stage props,
they're going to come onto center stage and be actors.
And that is deeply disturbing
to white Southerners and to many people in the North.
NARRATOR: Across the South,
black newspapers exhorted every black man
to seize the moment.
"He owes it to the martyrs
who have fallen to procure his rights,"
declared a Georgia newspaper.
"He owes it to his God,
who has wrought his freedom.
Let the Republicans of the North
know the strength
and character
of the colored vote in the South.
Vote.
Vote in spite of every threat."
To freedmen,
the ballot was sacred proof
they were bondsmen no longer,
but citizens at last.